Tuesday, August 09, 2016

The Airbnb Effect

One of the key criticisms of Airbnb in that it has a negative effect on affordable housing. Investigations into Airbnb, such as Airbnb's Impact in San Francisco and Airbnb vs Berlin, have looked closely at 'power users'. These are landlords who use Airbnb to make higher profits from short term
rentals rather than from renting to long term
tenants.

Inside Airbnb provide a number of mapped visualizations of Airbnb data in major cities around the world. These maps plot the locations of Airbnb listings in each city. Each map distinguishes between properties which are listed as single rooms and listings which are whole houses and apartments.

For example the London map shows that over half of all the properties listed on Airbnb are for the entire property. 43% of the entire property listings are by 'power users' - landlords who advertise more than one home on Airbnb. Most of these landlords are therefore presumably not renting out the home in which they live but are operating full-time hotels out of residential properties - against London's housing laws.

The Airbnb data compiled by Inside Airbnb for each city is available to download under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) "Public Domain Dedication" license.